In the 19th century, cloth was big business in East Africa. From present-day Somalia down to Mozambique, the whole eastern half of the continent was experiencing an economic boom as it exported elephant ivory, slaves, aromatics and spices to Asia, Europe, and North America. With their newfound wealth, East African consumers largely sought to acquire foreign cloth and beads.

The Ontario Road Ecology Group (OREG) has been working to protect biodiversity from the threats of roads through research, policy and stewardship initiatives with our partners. The Heart Lake Road in Brampton cuts through protected wetland complexes, and OREG has been there to help.

Sir David Attenborough has been filming Nature all his life. In 2009, at the age of 83, he traveled the world again to discover how Life began and diversified into the myriad of organisms that form the basis of today's biodiversity. The result of this journey is the beautiful documentary, "First Life," that won three Emmy Awards in 2011. The new ROM Gallery of Early Life anticipated to open by the end of 2014 will feature some of the key fossils shown in the documentary, many of those will come from our own ROM collections!

The origin of animals represents a turning point in Life history. About half a billion years ago all the major animal groups that are still around us today appear in the fossil record. One of the best sites in the world to study this key interval in Life history is the 505 million year old Burgess Shale in Yoho National Park, British Columbia. As an expert of the Burgess Shale biota, I was invited to accompany Sir David Attenborough to the field. Here are few snapshots from the Burgess Shale I took during this specific trip.

This blog post was written by Dr. Kim Tait, Curator of Mineralogy at the ROM. As the new recipient of the YPC Research Fund, Kim has travelled to the northeastern corner of the Yukon—a remote region rich with minerals called Rapid Creek. Her work builds on the legacy of ROM research on phosphate minerals, which are one of the largest and most complex in the mineral kingdom and act as the atomic building blocks of our natural world.

Mushroom season has only just started and already ROM mycologists have been out in the field conducting research and searching for new specimens to add to the museum collection. Last week I got the chance to join Jean-Marc Moncalvo, the ROM’s Senior Curator of Mycology, along with Ph.D. Candidate Santiago Sanchez and Josie Carding, a summer intern in the Schad Gallery of Biodiversity for a few days of foraging and camping in Ontario’s Awenda Provincial Park.